OpenAI, the people who brought you ChatGPT, are teaming up with the writers of Paddington 3 to make a movie about a bunch of forest animals that go on an adventure or something called Critterz.
As reported by The Wall Street Journal, what sets it apart from the rest of the CG animated pack is that Critterz is being made in just nine months on a budget of under $30 million. That’s chump change by industry standards, where animated features usually take years and cost a fortune.
Studios are usually willing to remain patient and cough up the money since animated children’s films are a lucrative business. If Critterz is even a modest success, and people aren’t immediately turned off by the inherent uncanny valley-ness of AI-created imagery, then it could usher in a new era of AI-generated animated film.
The movie, set for a global theatrical release in 2026 after a Cannes Film Festival debut, is being produced by London-based Vertigo Films, Los Angeles-based Native Foreign, and creative director Chad Nelson, a former animator who started the project using OpenAI’s DALL·E tool years ago. He’s now leading a hybrid production model: human-drawn sketches and voice talent are fed into OpenAI’s models like GPT-5 to help stitch the whole thing together. You can watch the original five-minute short film that started it all here.
OpenAI, eager to demonstrate that its collection of ones and zeros can replace every human on Earth, along with all their perspective and experiences gathered over a lifetime, that are then channeled into a single project that means the world to them, is putting its money where its mouth is. Why just talk about what AI could do when you can drop a full-length movie essentially made by no one?
Studios like Disney and Netflix have cautiously dipped their toes into AI for marketing and production support, but no one’s yet fully dived in on a feature like this.
Back in early August, the Wall Street Journal reported that Disney’s behind-the-scenes experiments with AI filmmaking have bordered on disastrous, thanks to a combination of legal concerns over the source of the AI’s inspiration and concerns that its use of AI may scare off the writers, actors, and animators Disney would still need to rely on to some degree in its many other animated and live action projects.
Disney was somehow surprised to discover that implementing a technology that could replace people’s jobs made people not want to work with them. What a shock.
While $30 million for a children’s animated film isn’t all that much, it’s still a gamble for OpenAI. The film has no distribution deal yet, and audiences aren’t exactly sprinting back to theaters for original IP nowadays, let alone one made by AI, which tends to create characters that look like they’re going to break the fourth wall and tell you, specifically, that they’re going to kill you.
But if Critterz somehow manages to get over all that and become a hit, it seems like a bit of an understatement to say that everything will change, but that’s exactly what’s going to happen. A quick and violent shift to an industry with fewer people, and therefore less of their perspective, their artistry. An industry that won’t just be lacking people, it’ll be lacking humanity.
The post OpenAI Is Getting Into the Movie Business With ‘Critterz’ appeared first on VICE.
